Ice mummies and artefacts emerge after dung age remnants surface

January 18 2003

Glacial warming has led to some breathtaking discoveries, writes Usha Lee McFarling.

Gerry Kuzyk was hiking in the remote reaches of the Yukon River when the biologist caught the putrid smell of caribou dung through the chill air. Then he found the biggest pile of animal droppings he had ever seen,

2.4 metres high and stretching over 800 metres of mountainside.

Kuzyk, a researcher with the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources, knew there weren't enough caribou in the entire territory to create such an epic mound. And there hadn't been caribou in the area for nearly a century.

"It was like being in The Twilight Zone," said Rick Farnell, a colleague who helped investigate the find. "You could see them from a distance - big, black bands of faeces. I'm talking tonnes of it."

The mystery was solved by lab analysis. The dung, the product of innumerable migrating caribou herds, had been frozen for thousands of years and only recently exposed by melting ice. Scientists also discovered an arsenal of Stone Age darts, arrows and spears. ");document.write("

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Most scientists believe the warming of the planet could radically alter the environment. But for archaeologists, it has prompted a breathtaking treasure hunt. Without any digging, the scientists are scooping up artefacts, mummies and fossils long hidden in the depths of monstrous glaciers.

"We walk right up and pull arrows and animals out of the ice," Farnell said.

Many of the items are random debris of 10,000 years of passing human and animal traffic. But the glaciers have also coughed up some stunning finds. In 1991 hikers in the Swiss Alps found a 5300-year-old ice man nicknamed Otzi, who had been felled by a flint arrow.

A second ice man, with a perfectly preserved woven hat and gopher-skin cloak, thawed out of the ice in British Columbia in 1999.

Piece by piece, the artefacts rising from the ancient ice are beginning to recast archaeologists' understanding of the thousands of years after the last great ice age, an epoch when animals began probing the northern fringes of the planet and bands of humans began to populate North America in large numbers.

"There's a whole new scientific window opening," said E. James Dixon, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Unlike buried dinosaur fossils or crumbling Mayan monuments, the glacier artefacts are relatively unchanged from the day they were encased in their icy tombs.

"They're so beautifully preserved, they look like they're asleep," Farnell said. "You can't tell whether they died last week or died 4000 years ago."

For archaeologists used to piecing together the past from chips of flint, finding soft organic material is rare bounty. They have flesh filled with DNA, feathers and dustings of ancient pollen. There are stomachs filled with the remnants of a last meal and patchworks of human tattoos.

The part of glaciers now melting captured a very particular slice of history - roughly 10,000 years from the end of the last great ice age to the present. The period began when the forbidding sheets of ice that had covered much of the Northern Hemisphere were beginning to retreat, opening a new realm of the planet to animals, birds and waves of human wanderers that eventually found their way to the Americas.

Over the ensuing years the glaciers ebbed and flowed, driven by vast, cycles in the weather that could send tongues of ice rushing downward, only to retreat to alpine refuges a few hundred years later.

The last one, known as the Little Ice Age, began around 1450 and completed its cycle around 1900.

The warming is expected to continue and perhaps accelerate, removing the frozen protection that has kept artefacts and bodies in such good condition. Without its blanket of ice, organic material decays and disappears.